As part of our commitment to integrate local and global contexts and to explore a range of issues related to the education of multilingual learners, the MLRC partners with researchers around the world through our Glocal Scholar series. As defined in our recent publication, “Glocal Network Shifts: Exploring Language Policies and Practices in International Schools“, the term glocal reflects our goal to problematize the boundaries that often exist between conceptions of “global” and “local”, including the separation sometimes observed between international schools and their local context.
Our first Glocal Scholar is Elisabet Pladevall-Ballester who is an Associate Professor at the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Elisabet will present at the first MLRC Research Symposium on November 18-19, 2023 at the American School of Barcelona. The MLRC Research Symposium is a unique two-day opportunity for international educators – teachers and leaders – to engage deeply in existing research about multilingual learners, connect with global education scholars, inquire together about shared problems of practice and discuss innovative strategies for serving multilingual learners.
Elisabet holds an MA in Linguistics from University College London (2002 – Distinction) (‘la Caixa’ fellowship (2000)) and a PhD in English Philology (2007 – FI-UAB Grant; Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado) from the UAB. Her doctoral research focused on the acquisition of grammatical subject properties in English and Spanish by children in immersion L2 contexts and adults in instructed L2 contexts and gave way to a broader interest in the study of foreign language learning by young, adolescent and adult learners in EFL and CLIL contexts.
Over the last ten years, she has been a member of several funded research projects and has been the Principal Investigator of two funded research projects on CLIL in primary education and the effects of peer-interaction on language development (FFI2010-19997 and PID2019-107328GB-I00). She created and has led the Research Group EFLIC (English as a Foreign Language in Instructed Contexts), which was recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR2014-693 and SGR2017-752) at the UAB and is now the coordinator of the same line of research within a broader research group in the Department (SGR2021-684). As of 2009, she has published extensively in JCR journals and international book series, such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Second Language Research, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language Acquisition, System and Language Teaching Research, among others as well as in Springer and Multilingual Matters. She has presented her research at more than 60 national and international conferences and has been invited to give research talks and seminars as well as plenaries at the University of Reading, the University of Southampton, King’s College London, National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan, Universidad del País Vasco, Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, UdL, U-Vic, UIC Barcelona and UB. She has supervised 4 PhD theses defended at the UAB and co-supervised (with Dr Ion Drew) a thesis defended at the University of Stavanger, Norway in 2019. She is currently supervising 6 PhD theses.
She has always conducted research on language development together with local and international educational institutions with whom she has signed collaboration and consultancy agreements and to whom she has delivered follow-up training sessions. She is co-director of the Language Acquisition and Learning panel at AESLA (Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada) and has been a member of conference scientific committees and a reviewer for JCR journals, ‘la Caixa’ fellowships, and Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain), where she is currently one of the managing collaborators of the scientific area Mente, Lenguaje y Pensamiento. She teaches a variety of undergraduate (BA English Studies) and graduate (Master in Advanced English Studies) courses at the UAB. She was the BA English Studies coordinator (2018-2023) and has been the Head of Department since February 2023.
We are very excited to welcome Elisabet to the MLRC Research Symposium. To connect with Elisabet and learn more about her research in person, please consider joining us in Barcelona. In addition, interested MLRC School Network members can reach out to her at elisabet.pladevall@uab.cat or visit her university website: https://webs.uab.cat/elisabetpladevallballester/